The syntactic structure of sentences in which a new word appears may provide listeners with cues to that new word's form class. In English, for example, a noun tends to follow a determiner ("a"/"an"/"the"), while a verb precedes the morphological inflection [ing]. The presence of these markers may assist children in…

According to a dominant thesis, nominal endings are the privileged cues French children use to determine new nouns' gender subclass. Children will rely on phonology even in cases of discordance with natural gender. Two elicited production studies involving more than 250 4- to 17-year-olds showed that while French children did not base their gender…